In the case of torture, the definition is not completely agreed upon. While you and I may call something torture, a government, i.e., the one in the USA, may not. While many have long held that waterboarding is torture, the US Government, during the Bush Administration, officially stated it was not and directed government employees to behave as if it were not.

I understand it is a possible legal defence, but I do not see how any government, even with the most cursory investigation of the history and legal precedent could say this with any  sense of reality, and any departmental lawyer when handed this decision should have said to the people involved that the ruling was legaly dubious, rather than said "Well the department of justice says its ok, so lets go ahead" and should have cried off. The CIAs lawyers would have noted that the US government had declared waterboarding to be torture in the cases of German and Japanese members of their armed forces (Plus Norwegian and French police collaborators) in the aftermath of WWII, as a more recent example, a US sheriff and his associates had recieved ten years imprisonment for waterbording suspected criminals, from The Ronald Reagan Justice department.

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

Do you have a civilized government in mind? If so, where has it been throughout the "civilized" history of mankind?

Civilisation is obviously a matter of degree, and no actual state in history has been what I'd call "fully civilised." But on this particular subject, I would say that the British, French and Americans in the immediate aftermath of the second world war were more civilised than contemporary Americans. Of course you can find other issues where this is not the case (colonialism, institutionalised racism, treatment of the poor, ill or mentally infirm, to name but a few). But on this particular topic, things have been slipping.

Please don't take me wrong.  I agree with your ideals; things should be that way, but it ain't gonna happen.

And I understand that. I just think it should be made clear that the reason it's not going to happen is that certain named political actors are determined and able to obstruct justice, not because there is a lack of jurisprudence on the issue or because their pseudo-legal defences have any merit.

I can accept that we're going to lose the political battle over whether due diligence will be observed in the investigations of Anglo-American torture programmes. What I will not accept is the fiction that due diligence was exercised and there was nothing there that could be prosecuted.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.